My First Date: 13 Years Old; Coventry Rhode Island.

Names have been acronymized to protect the potentially innocent.

You may not think this at all possible, but in junior high school, I could have counted the number of friends I had on my dick.  And that was just me.  

My mother and my sister and I had just moved to Coventry, Rhode Island, from Indonesia, and I would describe my difficulty in getting along with the locals as “culture shock,” but that would have given the place an awful lot of credit.  And it was fucking cold!  I got off the plane in Providence in October, arriving straight from an equatorial jungle.  It was 60 degrees and I was sure if it got ANY colder my balls would retract up my nose.  

It got colder.  Puberty was trying to kick in, but my body wasn’t about to let my poor new testicles drop into this ice bucket.  So I was a little late in the “care about girls” department for that reason, and also because most of my extra-curricular time was spent running home from the bus and crying.  

Fights were a regular occurrence at my school.  One day, a whole wing of the school was cordoned off with police tape because the sting of mace they’d used to break up a fight was still a bit too spicy—to break up a junior high kid fight, mind you.  So, I spent a lot of time running scared.  

Part of my problem was my inability to share certain values.  Our school district was hugely famous for wrestling, so they started everyone early, and on the very first day of wrestling class, I got called up in front of the whole gym to be a demonstration puppet.  I had no aptitude for wrestling, but the coach had a keen and sadistic intuition when it came to picking out the smallest and most frightened boy to prop up in front of a hungry crowd.  I should’ve just let myself be humiliated, and I knew that even then, but for some reason, when the coach said “wrestle!,” I stood straight up and fell over backwards, without bending at the waist.  I’d seen Bert do this every time Ernie said something incredibly outrageous, and I had practiced for hours in my basement with couch cushions.  The wrestling mat provided perfect padding and I pulled it off flawlessly, but my reward came in the form of an incensed coach who made everyone in the class do push ups and sit ups and jumping jacks, and then laps around the gym—which turned into me running away from everyone in a continuous circle.  I have been really opposed to running for enjoyment my entire life, and I am pretty sure it’s because of instances like this.  

So between periods, I’m getting my books out of the locker, I turn around, and there is a horseshoe of guys from class blocking me in.  To complete the movie moment, two of them are punching their fists into their palms.  Their de facto “leader” says “What’re you doing?,” and I say, “Oh not much, just getting pushed around by a bunch of assholes.  You?”  And in the split second it took them to realize I had just said that, PFFFFFTTTT!  I was gone.  Like I’d thrown down linguistic ninja smoke bomb.  But I knew that I’d only upped the level of violence I was to eventually receive.  

At lunch that day, I sat by myself, as always, and stared at the soda machine across the room.  I got $2.50 a day for lunch money, and a dollar a week in allowance.  This had been hard to swallow.  In Indonesia I had gotten 100 rupia a week, which is only about 13 cents, but no amount of explaining of exchange rates could stop me from feeling like one could never be worth more than 100.  Anyway, some days when I was feeling like I might die later that day, I would treat myself to a soda from the machine, which was 75 cents!  Only the true robber baron elite of the junior high caste system could afford such luxury, and today, that was going to be me!

I put my dollar in, punched the picture button, took the soda, and reached for the change return, when these two girls who had never stood next to, looked at, nor acknowledged my existence in any way, appeared like they’d just disapparated (Harry Potter vocabulary word I was yet to learn. You see, my junior high life took place “in the past.”) in my field of vision, and instantly in tandem said “Can we have your quarter?”  To which I said nothing, while handing it to them.  

That night, after running home from the bus and crying, something different happened.  I got mad.  Not at the boys for doing their part to perpetuate the cycles of violence their fathers had bestowed upon them, but for giving those girls my quarter.  I mean, at some point I was going to have to decide to have some pride.  I was apparently much more ready to pick a battle with two pretty girls than a gym full of boys.  I had one more dollar that I’d saved from my last baby tooth, in a jar in my sock drawer, and that night I slept with it under my pillow.  

I had to catch the bus very early in the morning, and in winter that meant it was still dark.  I hadn’t slept well the night before and was having one of those mornings where you can’t remember how to dress yourself anymore and find yourself standing in the room with a shirt and shoes and no pants.  So I tried to pull on a pair of pants over the shoes, and got so stuck that I had to take the shoes off to get the pants off, and then the shoes were stuck in the pants, so I had to find new pants, and those didn’t match the shirt I was wearing so I took that off, and while doing so managed to put my fist through the lamp under the fan, raining glass and darkness all over me, so I did the only thing I could think of and sat down and cried in the dark for a while.  It was below-frozen wind-chill cold outside, and I have very sensitive ears for some reason—when they get cold, they hurt, and then my whole head is pain until they warm up again—but I couldn’t wear a hat, because it would mess up my hair, which I had learned could get you beat up, and I couldn’t wear ear muffs, because ear muffs were gay.  My early understanding of homosexuality was that it was a legally punishable offense.  

So my head had almost stopped hurting by lunch when I spotted the two girls by the soda machine.  On a very one-track mission, I marched up to them, put my dollar in, punched the button, and as they started to ask their question, I interrupted them with my prepared speech of “NO!,” grabbed my quarter, and marched triumphantly back to my empty table, my victory sip only marred by the ABSENCE OF MY SODA which I had left IN THE MACHINE FUUUCK!!!  It was in this state that a girl approached me, in what I was to learn later as “standard junior high protocol,” handed me a folded piece of paper, and said “TB likes you!” before skittering away.  

The note said, “Do you want to go to the movies tomorrow? 8pm Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.”  Below that were two words, “Yes” and “No,” with a little box drawn next to each.  I checked yes, left the note at the table, survived the rest of the day, and at dinner that night told my Mom I would need a ride to the movie theatre the next night.  

“What time?”

“8 o’clock.”

Mom drops me off at the movie theatre at 7:55.  There’s a line around the block.  Rhode Island is not the cultural mecca you’ve been told it is, so unbeknownst to me, Sir Kevin Costner was the hottest ticket in town.  I find TB and her friend at the front of the line.  She has run into some other friends who have convinced her, ergo us, to NOT see Sir Kevin Costner’s latest attempt, but instead to go see “Necessary Roughness,” a completely forgettable movie about college football, loosely advertised as a ‘comedy,’ starring Sinbad and Scott Bakula.  Gosh!  I hope THIS group of rag-tag sports losers can find some way to pull together as a team and beat that one other team that humiliated them earlier in the film!!!  WE HAVE TO KEEP MAKING THESE MOVIES UNTIL SOMEBODY GETS IT RIGHT!!!  FUCK!!!

All I remember about the movie is that every time I leaned back, TB leaned forward, and every time I leaned forward, TB leaned back.  As soon as the credits rolled, I got up and left; date accomplished.  That movie, however, was a good half- hour shorter than “Robin Hood,” which my mom thought I was seeing, and since these were the days BEFORE cell phones, I had a while to kill before she picked me up.  “The Simpsons” arcade game would do nicely, and I had one quarter in my pocket.  

I chose Bart, of course, wielding my skateboard as a weapon.  With an almost impossible blend of focus and determination, I defeat the ENTIRE first level on ONE quarter.  My complete focus barely allows me to notice that this feat has attracted a small crowd of gawkers.  In the little between-levels-plot-development scene, Maggie is stolen away on a balloon that says “Level Two!,” and as Level Two begins, somebody behind me says, “Is this Level Two?,” to which I say “That would seem pretty obvious to anyone who can read,” to which he says—well, he didn’t say anything at first, he just held a knife up to my throat.  Then he said, “You wanna’ fight?”

Now, please know, dear listeners, know that I survived.  I don’t want any people held in undue suspense about whether or not I made it through this—I assure you I did.  The next day at the police station while filling out the police report, the sergeant told me to “write down exactly what happened.”  And as I did so, I cried and cried because every time I wrote down what he said, and what I said, I was thinking, “Why the fuck did I SAY THAT?!? I could’ve been killed!!”  

Here’s what happened:  He asks, with a switchblade the size of banana held against my throat, “You wanna fight?”

Level Two had just begun!  So I said, “No.”

This gave him brief pause before responding, “I said, let’s fight,” to which I replied, “Oh, I heard you, and then I said no.”

Another brief pause while I continued striking virtual opponents about the head mercilessly with my skateboard.  And then:  “Let’s go outside.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not.”

“You have a knife.”

“I’ll put it down.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I swear to God I’ll put it down.”

“OK.”

“Ok.  Let’s go.”

“Not right now.  I don’t want to waste my quarter.”

“OK.  Soon as you’re done.”

He continues to patiently hold the knife against my throat, waiting the end of my virtual life, so he may begin on the real one, and if any of you have ever played the Simpsons arcade game before, you will know there are fucking BEARS in Level Two—come on Bart get the apple Bart get the apple Bart GET THE APPLE BART—and finally somebody in the movie theater notices this situation and alerts the mall-cop, who heroically tackles this 16-year-old kid off of me.

Afterward, standing out on the curb in front of the theatre, there are a couple cop cars with their lights flashing around.  They’re cuffing the kid and putting him in the back of one of the squad cars.  I’m shaking hands with the detective who’s handing me one of his business cards and explaining that he should have my mom call him as soon as possible to go fill out a report.   I look to the left in time to see TB and her Mom STARING at me, so I waved and for some odd 13-year-old reason said, “Hi Mrs. Boyd! Saturday night, huh?!”  Coolest, most unemotional thing, like I’d been nailing ne’er-do-wells my enTIRE life, until the next day when I wrote down what I’d said and had a complete freak out at myself.  

That Monday when I got off the bus at school, a crowd of kids met me at the door with “PHIL! I heard some high school kid pulled a knife on you at the movies and you kicked the crap out of him!”  And I didn’t so much say anything in response to that as much as I just, kind of, shrugged affirmatively.  I didn’t have to run home from the bus for two years.  I didn’t go on another date for three.  Funny how we all read the news and think, “Oh, how terrible,” and “How could somebody DO such a thing?,” and if you’ve ever BEEN in the news, all you can think is “they didn’t get ANY of this right.”